Our Mission

Mission

Bay Area Jewish Healing Center is dedicated to providing Jewish spiritual care to those living with illness, to those caring for the ill, and to the bereaved through direct service, education and training, capacity building, and information and referral.

Established in 1991 as the nation’s first Jewish healing center, Bay Area Jewish Healing Center provides spiritual care sometimes referred to as chaplaincy or pastoral care and support services to anyone who wants spiritual care, regardless of affiliation or financial resources.

We receive support from the Jewish Community Federation of San Francisco, the Peninsula, Marin and Sonoma Counties, and various foundations and individuals.

Values

We serve the entire diversity of the Jewish community regardless of age, class, financial capacity, intellectual or emotional status, sexual orientation, gender identity, familial status, or affiliation (see, for example, an article written by one of our staff, Rabbi Elliot Kukla, on “Transgender Sensitive Spiritual Care” at transtorah.org).

While we in the Jewish community spend important time discussion the education of our children and ways we can take care of our elderly, child rearing and aging are not universal human experiences. Not everyone bears or raises children and not everyone sees old age. Illness, coming to our last breath, and living with grief, however, are universal human experiences. No one gets through life unscathed. Everyone gets sick, comes to their last breath, and come to live with grief. These universal human experiences naturally stimulate spiritual reflection and they reasonably yearn for a communal response.

Jewish Healing combines ancient tradition with modern tools to provide spiritual support for individuals and families as they struggle with life’s greatest challenges.

We define Jewish Healing as a journey toward wholeness.* From spiritual reflection to prayer, ritual, or text, for example, Jewish Healing practices can bring deeper considerations of one’s life and relationships both individually and communally while in the midst of illness, dying, and grief.

* The notion of healing as a journey toward wholeness was first articulated in “Passage to Wholeness” by Rabbi Eric Weiss in Reform Judaism Magazine, December 1996.